Saturday, July 9, 2016

Following is the final post about Bishop’s letter of 5 July
1956. Bishop didn’t write only about finances, health and world events to
Grace, she was also eager for Grace to learn about her literary successes. At this
moment in time that included the Pulitzer Prize, which she received in May for
her collection Poems: North & South—A
Cold Spring.

(Pulitzer Prize medal)

Bishop had informed her aunt about this prestigious award
(which, she said helped convince Lota’s many friends that she {Bishop} really
was a poet) in an earlier letter; but that letter is no longer extant. She
asked, “I don’t think you got the funny clippings about the Pulitzer P that I
sent you from here, did you?” Bishop noted that she had sent the same package
of clippings to Aunt Florence, “and she never mentioned them either.”
Resignedly, she observed that a batch of eight letters sent at the same time
seemed to have “got lost.” But just as well, she added, as the photos of her
were “far from flattering, but Lota’s library came out pretty well.” She sent
them not only to “amuse” Grace, and to let her aunt see “what a sylph I am…118
lbs — 115 is my goal”; but also because it deeply mattered to Bishop that her favourite aunt
know of this success.

Grace’s most recent letter must have contained a response to
a poem of Bishop’s that she had recently read. Her niece replied, “The poem you
saw must have been ‘Manuelzinho’ — about L’s kind-of-a-gardener — wasn’t it?
It’s all completely true.” So, Grace was keeping track of things on her own,
too.

("Manuelzinho," published in The New
Yorker on 26 May 1956)

Bishop recounts a few stories about Betty (the cook’s
daughter): “She’s almost 18 months old now, has 10, almost 12 teeth, and is
‘into everything’.” Bishop offers another lengthy disquisition about
child-rearing to her expert aunt (“but they say NO all day long, when
it’s much easier to put the carving knife where it belongs…”), concluding,
“Well, all this about babies isn’t exactly news to you, I’m afraid.”

She gets around to Aunt Florence, too: “Your dinner party
with Aunt F sounds rather grim!” One can only imagine the things Florence said
to Bishop during her childhood and adolescence to make Bishop observe over and
over that “she is really absolutely impossible, poor thing,” because she always
managed to “say the most unkind thing of all.” One of those things, as
Bishop remembered was: “One of her favorite cracks to me is that being a writer
makes a woman coarse, or masculine…!”

In spite it all, Bishop continued to correspond with Florence, and when her
aunt died in the early 60s, she left her niece a bequest. It would be
interesting to know what Bishop did with this money.

This letter also mentions several of her cousins: 1. two
Bishop cousins, Kay and Nancy, who had the unenviable task of dealing with Florence; 2. Phyllis, Grace’s
daughter, who was about to have her second child; and 3. Elizabeth, Mary’s
oldest daughter, who ended up living in Brazil for several years. Family (that
is, relatives) were not distant abstractions for Bishop. She kept in continuous
contact with her aunts and cousins, and seemed genuinely keen to hear about
their activities, especially Grace’s children. As Ellie O’Leary recently wrote
in an essay about Bishop and her childhood, Bishop was an orphan but not
abandoned. No one can replace parents and siblings, of course, but Bishop’s
ties with family were complex and enduring (just like they are for most of us).

As solitary as Bishop was, like her “Sandpiper,” on many
levels, she adhered quite persistently to her family, even as they were
difficult to deal with, even as they were far away when she lived in Brazil.

Subscribe To

RSS Feed

Your Hosts:

John Barnstead

I retired in 2014 after forty years of teaching Russian language and literature. I'm a past president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Sandra Barry

I am a poet, independent scholar, freelance editor, and secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Suzie LeBlanc

I am a professional singer who recently has become a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop's writing. I am also fond of walking and nature. I became involved with the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary because I wanted to have her poems set to music so that I could sing them.